Tag Archives: Product Revenues

Saw this article today about Gartner, a Boston based advisory firm (and competitor to AMR Research where I used to work) announced that the iPhone is ready for business applications. As my friend Ash had written about earlier, one has to wonder about the future of Apple’s business model.

Apple is the darling of many and people love the products they make. But public consumer product companies, for anyone who has looked at their revenues and earnings are notoriously volatile. Consumer products take a lot of resources to develop and there is no guarantee that they will be successful in the market. This results in revenues that look like a roller coaster which is makes it hard for management to make long term decisions about the company, such as what investments to make, how much to invest in R&D, how much to hire etc.

Any management company worth its salt will quickly try offset the volatility of their earnings by finding additional sources of revenues besides products. Most companies do this by including a service or subscription based revenue. Apple tried to do this without a subscription model by introducing the iTunes platform. This platform ostensibly would allow them to offset the valleys of product revenues through more predictable revenues from individual song and music purchases.

“Apple, which is thought to make relatively little money from the iTunes store compared with its hardware sales, is also understood to be examining a subscription model”

This is interesting news and provides some insight into the crisis that Apple is facing. As the purveyor of consumer goods which are priced at a premium, Apple is susceptible to the vagaries of the broader economy as a whole. Combine that existing risk with the risk from getting most of their revenues from product launches and suddenly, their outlook is not that strong.

It makes complete sense for Apple to start looking to get more predictable cash flows from a iTunes subscription model, as opposed to a pay-per-purchase model. Observant users will note that the model proposed by Apple in the FT article is not that different from Amazon’s Kindle business model – where the product and subscription are bundled in together at a single price.